Best quotes by Jesmyn Ward on Family

Checkout quotes by Jesmyn Ward on Family

• ‟ My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ My mom is the kind of mom, when we would go to a friend of the family's house, and they would offer us something to drink or offer us something to eat, my mother would always say, 'Tell them no.' You could be starving - you could be dehydrated - but as kids, we were supposed to tell the host, 'No.'

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.

  - Jesmyn Ward
  

• ‟ My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

  - Jesmyn Ward